We know that a radical change is underway in the world of work, the outcome of which we still cannot figure out, nor the consequences. Even the best paid and stimulating jobs, considered to be at the top of people's expectations, are knocked down like skittles by anxiety about the future and people's new feeling in today's world.
Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mike Isaac, two scrutiny journalists of the New York Times they tell us what is happening to the workers in the coolest place in the world, Silicon Valley, where in Steinbeck's time plums grew on the trees and today money grows, or rather Bitcoins.
It happens that something still undefined, uncertain and nebulous, up to now even ridiculed and considered an oracular option, the best brains of the Valley enter the cave of this Cumanan Sibyl in a state of trans. And in this state of settlement, many technologists decide to leave lucrative positions in the CATCH (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) to launch elsewhere.
This is the great escape into crypto, a word that already says it all even in an etymological sense.
The best brains in the world are going right there.
This is how the two Times reporters tell us about this almost biblical exodus.
A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY IN A GENERATION
When Sandy Carter stepped down as vice president of Amazon's cloud computing unit in December 2021, he announced in a LinkedIn post that he was starting a new venture at a crypto technology company, Unstoppable Domains. He also put a link to open positions in the new start-up.
Within two days, more than 350 people – many already employed by major internet companies – clicked on the link and applied for jobs at the company. The start-up sells website addresses that are located on the blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.
“It's the perfect storm. The momentum we are seeing in this space is just incredible,” Carter commented.
She herself is part of a wave of executives and engineers who are leaving their comfortable jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and the FANGs – some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation – to pursue what they see as a one-of-a-kind opportunity. generation. The next big thing will be crypto, a name that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and other blockchain-based technologies.
A WHIRLPOOL OF BRAINS AND RESOURCES
Silicon Valley is filled with stories of people launching into seemingly unlikely crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital currency based on a dog meme, to get rich in a life-changing way. Bitcoin rose nearly 60 percent in 2021, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased in value more than fivefold.
But beyond this speculative craze, a growing platoon of the tech industry's best and brightest brains see crypto as a transformative moment that comes once every few decades and rewards those who spot seismic change before the rest of the world. In cryptocurrencies, they see historical parallels with the arrival of the personal computer and the internet that were initially ridiculed, and instead ended up overturning the status quo and creating a new generation of billionaires.
Investors have jumped in too. They've invested more than $28 billion in global cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a company that tracks private investment. More than $3 billion went into the NFT companies.
“There is a giant suction noise coming from the crypto world,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of start-up Neeva, a search engine, and former Google executive, which competes with crypto firms for the best brains. “It feels like the 90s again with the birth of the internet. It's so premature and so chaotic and so full of opportunities."
A NEW INTERNET
Crypto, which has also been dubbed after the less-boosting web3, may be no different from asset bubbles of the past like subprime mortgages or the XNUMXth-century tulip craze, skeptics say. Much of the craze is driven by a desire to get rich quick on an asset class that often appears to be based on a joke narrative.
But the growing ranks of true adepts are convinced that crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet which is not controlled by a handful of companies. While Bitcoins have been around since 2009, crypto products like the NFT they broke into the mainstream just this year. This has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies to the crypto world.
This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left Uber's competitor company to join OpenSea, a popular cryptocurrency start-up. “I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to understand when something big is emerging,” she said in an email. “We are day one in terms of NFTs and their impact.”
Last month, Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO to spend more time on cryptocurrencies and building web3 at his other company, Square. With an explicit blockchain reference, Dorsey has also rebranded Square to Block. She wanted to emphasize the change by changing the photos of Block executives to block-headed avatars and recommended a tool so others could create their own block-headed avatar.
And David Marcus, the head of cryptocurrency projects at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that at the end of 2021 will leave Meta to follow his “entrepreneurial DNA”. Marcus, 48, plans to work on his own cryptocurrency project, two people familiar with his plans have confirmed.
GOOGLE RUNS FOR COVERS
The allure of crypto has become such an irresistible siren that some of the biggest tech companies are struggling to keep their employees. At Google, concerns about retaining employees – including not losing them to cryptocurrency startups – have become so pressing that the issue has become part of the agenda discussed every Monday by Sundar Pichai, the CEO of the company, with its most important collaborators.
Google also began offering additional stock incentives to employees in parts of the company that appeared ripe for recruitment by crypto companies.
Unlike Meta, which has long embraced the crypto world, Google has been reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. But Google employees saw firsthand the opportunities presented by the new technology when Surojit Chatterjee, one of Google's vice presidents, left the company last year to become the head of product at Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange.
When Coinbase went public in April, Chatterjee's shares in the company soared to more than $600 million. She worked there for only 14 months.
THE ANXIETY OF FOMO
Such enormous value of crypto stocks has sparked FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) anxiety among many technologists – especially among those whose friends bought Bitcoin several years ago and are now enormously wealthy.
“In 2017 or so, people were entering this world mostly as an investment opportunity,” said Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mysten Labs, a start-up focused on building blockchain infrastructure projects. “Now they are people who actually want to build things.”
Cheng, 50, left Facebook in September after six years to work on his crypto project Novi. Of Mysten Labs' roughly 20 employees, most of whom are spread across San Francisco, London, New York and elsewhere, about 80 percent come from tech companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix.
Companies focused on blockchain technologies have proliferated, including cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bitpanda, Gemini and CoinList, as have NFT companies in the field of art collecting such as OpenSea and Dapper Labs. The same happened to infrastructure companies like Dfinity and Alchemy.
THE PLUS OF CRYPTO COMPANIES
Some of the crypto brain drain has also been driven by concerns about the control and dominance of the biggest tech companies. Many have joined Google, Facebook and other FANGs to create something new and instead have encountered the bureaucracy and difficulty of working in colossal companies.
Those who leave behind a paycheck from Big Tech don't have to wait that long to find it again at a cryptocurrency start-up.
While employees generally accept a cut salary at tech startups in hopes that the company's stock will hit the jackpot, workers at crypto startups are quickly stocked with "cash" with the ability to cash in on their shares very Before. Often, they can do this in the form of their company's cryptocurrency exchange, according to Dan McCarthy, a recruiter for investment firm Paradigm who has written on the potential upside of crypto startups for tech workers.
A DIFFERENT ETHOS
In some cases, cryptocurrency start-ups offer compensation packages equal to those of the largest tech companies thanks to the easy convertibility of the company's "tokens" – or the underlying cryptocurrency that backs the start-up – into cash.
“It doesn't happen that you take a third of your Big Tech salary, because many of these crypto companies are well capitalized,” Cheng said.
Sandy Carter, the former vice president of Amazon, is convinced that people are interested in working at cryptocurrency companies for more than just money. Some are attracted to the web3 ethos, which strives to decentralize power and decision-making. It's an alternative to the way Google and Facebook have come to dominate the internet by hoarding users' personal data to sell advertising.
Carter said there is great interest in web3 at Amazon, but she is not recruiting at Amazon, as she has pledged not to contact ex-colleagues.
So will the exodus of technologists into cryptography continue?
“The answer is absolutely yes,” he said. “The timing is just perfect to jump on the crypto train.”
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From: Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mike Isaac, The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups, “The New York Times”, December 22, 2021
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Daisuke Wakabayashi covers tech from San Francisco, covers Google and other companies for The New York Times. He spent eight years at the Wall Street Journal, first as a foreign correspondent in Japan and then as a correspondent in San Francisco.
Mike Isaac writes about technology and author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, a NYT best-seller about the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley and works in the San Francisco office of the Times
